


Sweet and Bone

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Hänsel und Gretel | Hansel and Gretel (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Dark Magic, F/M, Fairytale Motifs, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-31
Updated: 2013-11-03
Packaged: 2017-12-30 23:35:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1024720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A girl and a boy venture into a dark forest, where something wicked waits in a house made of sweets. </p><p>Or: Brienne of Tarth emerges seemingly unscarred from her encounter with Lady Stoneheart, comes to Jaime Lannister compelled to tell a tale which causes a fateful shift in their relationship and takes them deep into the woods. When they play the game of truth and lies, the stakes will be their hearts and lives.</p><p>A response to the 2013 Halloween J/B Fairytale Challenge (Monsters, Maidens, and Creatures in Between)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, J/B shippers! Welcome to this A Song of Ice and Fire/Hansel and Gretel fusion. This fic diverges from canon in AFFC and takes a sharp turn into pure AU territory, causing Pod and Hyle and the Inn at the Crossroads to jump off and disappear. Spoilers through ADWD, I own nothing.

Brienne of Tarth knew about honor. 

Honor was making promises one intended to keep. Honor was plain speaking. Honor was violent action only to defend the weak and protect the innocent, not to abuse or persecute. Honor was pledging loyal service unto death to a worthy lord or lady, and having no fear of death thereafter. Honor was better than marriage or children or love. Honor was the only thing worth living for. 

Despite everything that had happened to her since she left her father’s hall to join King Renly’s host, Brienne’s understanding of honor had not wavered or changed. She still considered it the only thing worth living for. She was also certain that her life was not worth anything, and honor was a word that should never pass her lips. This was not so terrible. Brienne did not hold her life in such high esteem that she should fear its loss. The trouble was that there were other words she could not utter, words that did not concern her alone. Words she had to speak or lose the world entire. 

When she found Jaime Lannister encamped at Pennytree, she knew she had to tell him, make him understand. Convince him that she was a liar, she, a woman he thought honorable and true above all others, to whom he had bestowed a sword called Oathkeeper because of her unwavering steadfastness. She had to convince him not to listen to her story, not to follow her into the woods, to kill her right away lest his own life be forfeit. That would be a good death, she thought, to die by his hand, not lose whatever was left of her heart and soul. But when she was admitted into his tent and saw him by the light of a brazier, bathed in the gold of the flame and the crimson of the tent cloth, her heart dropped inside her like a stone, she could not speak at all. He teased her, of course, called her a mute wench, asked if she had missed him so much her tongue got left behind in her hurry to get there.

 _Yes. I had. It was_ , she thought, mutely, did not wonder at his failure to ask how she had found him, tracked him down to that war-ravaged hamlet. 

She opened her mouth to tell him the truth, about the binding placed on her and the falsehood she was meant to tell him, about the creature that lurked in the woods. Tell him that he did not have to go, must not go. Must kill her instead, that _that_ would be justice enough for Brienne’s failure to keep a single promise she had made in her brief life. 

The words would not come. They stuck in her throat and squeezed it like a gauntleted fist, till she went bright red and coughed and hacked with the effort. The binding held fast, despite the distance she had placed between herself and the binder, despite her desperation to tell him. 

Jaime slapped her back with his good hand. “Easy, wench! You did not come all this way to find me just to expire at my feet for lack of breath. Some wine, I think, and then you may tell me how your quest goes.” 

Her quest. She wanted to weep at the twisted thing it had become, the promise she had made to Lady Catelyn, the promise she had made to Jaime, the promise she had refused to give to the thing in the woods, which had been forced from her regardless. 

A few tears dropped from her eyes, alarming Jaime sufficiently to sit her down by the brazier, thinking her merely unwell, cold and tired. He called for a meal to be brought, sat regaling her with tales of his exploits since their parting. She laughed a bit even as her eyes widened in horror at his threat to Edmure Tully, which had ended the siege of Riverrun. She cringed to hear of his father, and his brother, and his sister, whom he had forsaken at last. A man without honor, Lady Stark had called him and Brienne had thought him for so long, yet here he was, doing the impossible, the knight and war-leader he always should have been. And she had come to lure him to his doom, just when he was clawing his way away from the abyss. He _had_ changed, she had told the thing in the woods that much truth, for all the good it would do him. 

It was late. The camp had settled down for the night around them, intent on whatever sleep could be found before an early forced march on the morrow. Jaime’s tales were done. Brienne still had not spoken. He watched her intently by the dying light of the brazier, his cup empty, his face as open and kind as she had ever seen it. 

She took a deep breath to tell him of Sansa Stark, held captive in the forest a day’s ride away, of the Hound’s threat to kill the girl unless Brienne brought him Ser Jaime, of Brienne’s quest and Jaime’s promise brought together at last like two trees grown together with time. The words came to her easy as breath, light as air, poured from her lips like a Spring torrent and pooled before his feet, a lucent lake of lies. Brienne wanted to weep and scream and beg him not to believe her, but she could only speak the lie she had been taught and bound to tell. 

Jaime nodded thoughtfully. “The Hound never could abide anyone better or better-looking than himself. Which,” he grinned, “means, of course, everyone. We will ride out in the morning, wench, and rescue the girl from the brute. It will do my men good to rest another day, and me to cross swords with someone who might actually give me a decent fight. Someone other than you,” he added to make her blush, and succeeded. 

Brienne opened her mouth, found that she had nothing else to say now that her tale was done, closed it with an audible snap. Come the dawn, he would follow her into the wood, and there he would die, and it would be Brienne who killed him. She had no doubt about that. Whatever was left of Lady Catelyn in the thing which waited for them, some of her steadfast, rock-solid honor surely remained. She would bid them fight each other so that she could watch Brienne, her sworn liege, her champion, kill the man she called Kingslayer, who had crippled Lady Catelyn’s young son, bedded and protected the woman who as good as killed her two daughters, whose father had murdered her son Robb. 

She would bind them to a fight to the death, but perhaps she could not make Brienne kill Jaime. Perhaps Brienne could still let Jaime kill her, and thus save him. Perhaps the binding only applied to the tale Brienne had to tell, not to her acts toward Jaime. Perhaps she could fulfill what was left of her oath to Lady Catelyn _and_ save Jaime with one small sacrifice. She might even scrape together a little honor in such a death, though she did not cling to that hope. 

This was what she thought when she lifted her hand to stop Jaime from summoning a guard to find her an empty tent for the night, and found his wrist to be so warm and alive with the thrum of his blood it cut across her, sword-sharp, and left her gasping and open-mouthed for reasons which had nothing to do with the binding. She wondered what she must look like to him, with her open mouth and her eyes filled with tears, her fingers closed around his wrist like a tender vise. 

“Brienne,” he said, and she realized it was the first time he had spoken her name since she had entered the tent. She closed her eyes to keep the tears back, but they fell anyway. 

He pulled his wrist gently out of her blindly grasping hand. Did not ask about her tears, or about her worthless tale. Stroked her smooth, wet cheek with his fingers like she was worthy of such kindness, such tenderness. She snorted back more tears, not at all like a lady would have done, eliciting a knowing chuckle from him, but when she took a deep breath and opened her mouth again to force true words out, even if they cut her throat to shreds in the telling, she found she still could not speak. Could not speak because he was kissing her, he was kissing her, she was not imagining it or out of her wits with guilt and sorrow. He was kissing her, not as a friend or a brother might have done, a quick peck to stop her crying, but a kiss like the knight gave the fair maiden at the conclusion of most songs. Deep and gentle and strong. And more. Demanding and questing and _moist_. 

Brienne gasped in surprise, felt like she was dissolving into tears and snot and saliva and teeth and tongue. She had never kissed anyone to learn how to do it, but found it was easy, it was so easy. Her face was warm where he cupped it with his good hand and pleasantly cool where his golden hand caressed her skin. When Jaime pulled away from her, she wanted to whine like a scolded child, opened her eyes to find his face utterly devoid of mockery or teasing or any trace of cruelty. 

“I have missed you, my lady wench,” he said quietly, a hitch in his voice that shot through Brienne like an arrow made of water. 

She grasped hold of his shoulders and returned the kiss, let him put his fingers in her sweat-matted hair and guide her, tilt her head and kiss her like she was beautiful and good and worthy of being kissed like that. Let him kiss her throat till she was certain it would choke her the way the binding could not. His tongue flicked the hollow below her throat, and she knew she must taste of road dust and sweat and fear, but he did not seem to notice. Brienne realized that she was speaking, his name, only his name, again and again, in a voice so breathless she thought she must be dreaming, speaking with her last breath before the binding choked her. But her dreams had never felt this real, and she _had_ dreamed of him, dreamed of him often while they were apart. Sometimes while asleep but sometimes wide awake, on horseback while the sun warmed the back of her neck like his hand did now, and her own fingers ghosted over her throat much more hesitantly than his mouth did. 

Her words came back to her then, spoken not aloud yet binding as any promise made before the gods. A promise made to Lady Catelyn’s ghost, before Brienne knew that the dead did not always stay dead. She had sworn to give up everything, her life, her honor, all her dreams, to fulfill her pledge to her lady. Her honor was just a word blown away on the cold wind. She would give her life gladly on the morrow to save Jaime’s. And her dreams – a Rainbow Cloak, respect, glory, valor, the look on Jaime’s face when he had given her Oathkeeper – she knew now they had only ever been a little girl’s fancies, no more substantial than any Summer promise. All but one, and that a dream she had scarce dared dream. The most shameful, the most lowly of them all, the only one which remained still within her grasp. 

“Jaime,” she said, loud and clear enough that he lifted his head from the crook of her throat and looked at her, green eyes focusing on her face. She had no idea what she looked like, but it made him lick his lips, sending another shiver through her and lending her the courage to take his good hand off her neck and pull it down, between her legs, even as modesty and pride made her squeeze her thighs together. He caught his breath and swore when she squeezed his fingers between her thighs, as easily as though she had not only ever put her own fingers there, and that but rarely. _Perhaps he was right to call me wench from the start_ , she though and smiled sadly at herself, at what she had become.

“You forget that I have shit for honor, Brienne.” His tone even more than his words made her look at him, cool and level and with a hint of his usual cutting wit. So she saw at once that while he sounded like himself, the self she had marched halfway across the realm, he was as flushed as she felt, and his eyes were intent on his hand between her thighs, his palm cupping the smooth muscle there so close to where she wanted him but did not dare ask. “I have shit for honor,” he repeated, “and I am not going to protect your maidenly virtue from yourself.”

“I do not ask that of you, Ser,” she said, and wondered at how calm she sounded. Like another woman, someone desirable and soft and used to men’s attentions. Someone dishonorable and cruel and wanton. So, perhaps someone exactly like her. “Nor do I ask for your forbearance or your kindness. If you do not want me, summon the guard and let me go rest.” She made herself open her thighs a bit, loosening their grip on his fingers. “We need never speak of this. Forgive me.”

“Forgive you?” He sounded incredulous. She could not look at him.

Before the next night fell, she will have let him kill her and left him to live with the memory of her as someone dishonest and untrue, someone unworthy of mourning or of the faith he had placed in her so many times. 

“Yes, forgive me,” she said again, and thought that every tear she had ever shed should have come just then, but her eyes were dry and her mind clear. 

So clear that when he grabbed her under the armpits and pulled her to her feet so he could press himself against her from thigh to shoulder, so he could wrap his arms around her and pull her mouth down to his and push her backward, step by stumbling step, to his field bed, she did not think of anything before or anything after. She thought not at all, except with her skin and her mouth and the greedy space between her legs, and then only to find that what she thought was so very different than what she had sometimes dreamed and rarely dared imagine. So very different, and so much more than she could have hoped she would feel and do and know the night before her death. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember to brush your teeth! :-)


	2. The Boy

Jaime Lannister knew about liars.

He had spent his life surrounded by them. When his mother died, his father forbade everyone at Casterly Rock from speaking about her, as though silence could expunge her from memory, could fill the hole left in the air by her absence. When Jaime came to court and took the White Cloak and wrapped himself in his sister’s arms, when he killed a king and made out as if the name that earned him never stung, never even penetrated beneath his thick lion’s skin, he learned to lie better than anyone, to smile and dissemble and recognize lies and those who told them. 

Brienne always had been a terrible liar. Quite apart from her temperament and her stubborn notions of honor and the plain forwardness of her mind, she did not have the complexion for lies. So Jaime knew right away that she was not telling him the truth, not even a tenth part of it, when she came into his tent at Pennytree like an itinerant hero from a song and failed to speak even to respond to his jests. When she tried to speak and choked on the words, he almost pitied her, for the effort to hold back the truth and replace it with some rough-spun falsehood was clearly too much for the poor wench. 

But when she finally told him her absurd tale of Sansa Stark, held captive like a princess in a song by an ogre set on killing all those who came to rescue her, she blushed a red darker and brighter than even the Lannister crimson that had surrounded him since his youth, and he knew this was no ordinary lie. The words came too easily to the stammering girl he knew, and even her blush was like nothing he had ever seen before. So he knew that whatever the truth of it, it was terrible enough to compel the most honest (the _only_ honest) person he knew to spin him a story for children and expect him to swallow it whole, like a goose being fattened for slaughter. He went along with it to spare Brienne embarrassment, and because he suspected she would break down and tell him the truth before they reached whoever it was who waited in the woods less than a day’s ride away to have their pleasure of trying to kill him. He could think of quite a few possible candidates, feared none of them. Though his left hand was not what his right hand had been, he had gotten very good with it, and it had been a while since he had had a challenge. 

Then, he thought as he rose to fetch a guard and have Brienne settled for the night, _then_ he would have it out with the wench. She would tell him the why and the how behind the lie, and he would decide whether to tease and taunt her for her tender care or curse her for a fool for not trusting him enough. 

This was what he thought when Brienne caught his wrist between her fingers, strong as an ox, gentle as a dove, the gesture so unexpected his voice died in his throat and he had to look at her where she sat on a stool by the brazier. She looked the opposite of herself, the opposite of everything he had grown accustomed to imagine when he thought of her in her absence. She looked small and lost and frightened, and so vulnerable with her downcast eyes and her trembling lips he felt an overwhelming and truly foolish desire to startle her out of it, bring her back to her usual, determined self. This was what he told himself as he stroked her cheek and said her name and bent down to kiss her. Only, his blood and his flesh and his skin could not be lied to so easily. They reminded him, as she gasped and leaned into the kiss with a child’s eagerness but a woman’s desire, that he was a liar and an oathbreaker, and had thought of her and dreamed of her more often than he would care to admit, and not always in a way a knight should think of an honorable lady. 

Even so, he would have stopped himself, would have left the kiss an unspoken secret between them, to be taken away like another blanket or a whetstone in the Maid of Tarth’s saddlebags, something to keep her warm and keen when she was alone, perhaps, but of no greater consequence. Would have done so, had she not put his hand between her thighs with such ease, as though she were his lover of many years, his golden twin to whom such gestures had once come naturally ( _no, his blood murmured, you always had to slip your hand between her thighs, while you had two hands still_ ). 

Even _then_ , Jaime made himself say words honest yet harsh, to remind the girl of who he was and how far she could expect him to bend. Gave her the chance to let him go, to save herself. But when she did, when she let his hand go and spoke to him of acceptance and desire and the willingness to play the game of forgetting, she who had never learned to play games or let instinct have the better of her, he knew she was no longer lying. That whatever the terror which had closed up her throat and given him the story he had pretended to swallow earlier, she was speaking the truth now. The plain truth, plain as herself, as any word she had ever said to him before that night. A truth that went beyond honor and duty and all those other words which had hemmed him in like naked blades throughout his life. For all that he had let her believe her paltry tale of a little girl in the woods had convinced him, he had spoken the truth too, in his own fashion: he was not willing to protect her from herself when she opened her hands and her eyes and her mouth to him, and placed herself into his hand like a precious gift. 

This was what he told himself when he laid Brienne onto his field bed and set about unlacing her jerkin while his mouth kept busy on the inches of freckled skin thus uncovered, but again his own flesh betrayed him, would not let the lie stand. He wanted her, had wanted her before that night, and even though she had lied to him he could not bear to have the faith and admiration in her eyes turn to dust and ashes. Whether from vanity or a tenderness he mocked himself to think he possessed, he took care to be gentle with her, as gentle as he could until she gasped and squirmed under his mouth, tangled her thick fingers in his hair, showed him how she could bite and plead, without coyness, without any dissembling. Then he let himself take his pleasure of her and let her take hers of him, until they were both gasping and breathless, his good hand squeezing her hip so he knew she would bruise, her heels pressed into the sweat-slick small of his back like she would never let him loose again. 

Cersei came to him then, unbidden, how she would tease and entice him, so he had to grab her and hold her down and loose her as soon as they were finished, for fear of discovery, for fear that his sweet sister might let herself go so far as to admit she wanted him, needed him. She had admitted it in her last letter. Too late for everything. Jaime buried his head in Brienne’s shoulder and raged silently at himself, until he felt her stroke his hair, her fingers gentle where earlier she had tugged hard enough to make his scalp tingle, tugged him up from between her legs to have him fuck her, unafraid to ask, unafraid to give. He looked up and saw that the wench was crying, big, silent, gasping sobs, her eyes intent on the darkness under the top of his tent, her face transformed by tears into an ugly mask that had nothing to do with her lack of feminine charms. 

“Did I hurt you, Brienne?” he asked with genuine concern, but she shook her head, still not looking at him. Would not tell him why she cried, though he could guess well enough, the shame for her lost honor and the shame for the lie she still concealed from him mingling in her breast. 

She went away somewhere deep inside until she had found and seized whatever calm she could, then came back to him, eyes open and brilliant in the light given by the last embers in the brazier. Those eyes that had first captured him, somewhere in the Riverlands, back in the days when he had only seen her as a walking jape and an unworthy jailer. 

Jaime told himself he would get the truth out of her soon enough, all of it, and could get other truths out of her till then. Kissed her eyes like his mouth was the sun kissing a lake, reveled in the flutter of her eyelids beneath his lips, kissed her wide mouth, her nose, her chin, until she kissed him back, ran a bolder hand over his skin, turned and molded herself to him, to learn another way to make them both tremble and sigh. He knew they should sleep, knew he still had a fight ahead of him though she would not tell him who his opponent would be, knew that a soldiers’ camp never truly slept, and her cries of surprise and pleasure would remove any possibility of her ever leaving the name ‘Kingslayer’s whore’ behind. He did not care. Let himself take what the gods he did not believe in had sent and was grateful while Brienne’s breathing steadied and eased against his neck, her hand lying slack and sticky on his stomach, his own hand held again between her thighs like a bird between gentle hands. 

By the time the birds of the forest were shrilling their last of the following day, and the sun had slipped behind the thick trees, she still had not admitted her falsehood or even hinted that there was one. Jaime rode Honor, sometimes beside Brienne, sometimes just behind her, so he could keep an eye on her while he probed. 

How far was it to the Hound’s hideaway? Not far. How would they find it in the wildwood? Brienne pointed at the large white stones which dotted their path at regular intervals. Known as the Teeth of the First Men, they may have been road markers or gravestones, altars or dropped bricks for all anyone knew. Follow the path marked by the white stones, she said. 

The words fell from her mouth smooth as butter, all part of the lie. That thought led him to think of slickness, of Brienne open and willing under him, thrashing like a big, beached fish, all smooth and salty with the brine that had pooled between her legs for him. He shifted uncomfortably in his saddle, causing Honor to whicker a wordless question, bringing a rueful grin to Jaime’s lips. They would be there soon, wherever _there_ was, and he would have a fight in the gathering dusk before him, yet all he could think about was stopping for a while so he could get the wench out of her breeches and tumble her in the grass or maybe have her up against one of the trees, see if he was strong enough to hold her up while he made her moan and thrust against the rough bark. 

“How is your seat, my lady?” he asked in his most cheerful voice. “Does the saddle not rub you raw?” He watched the flush spread up the back of her neck, felt a stab of savage delight: the blush did not lie. He pressed the advantage, asked the question he had been holding back since the previous night, asked it before he could consider how likely she was to answer him.

“Who is really waiting to cross swords with me, Brienne?” he crooned, not unlike he had done while shouldering her legs apart, while wrapping her hand around his cock. “It cannot be the Hound, he is dead and hated me no more than he did anyone else. Nor is Sansa Stark anywhere near this forest.” He watched her rigid back, her red neck. “Is she, Brienne? Who is really waiting for us, and why did you lie to me about it?” The more he probed, the angrier he got. Despite his faith in her and hers in him, despite their coupling and how sincere he had been and known her to be then, he found that her lie had chafed at him all night and all day until he was sore and seething with it. 

Brienne pulled on her reins even as a strangled sound reached him from her, the same sound she had made before she had told him her smooth, silky, false tale. Jaime frowned, spurred his horse forward until it stood beside Brienne’s on what little remained of the path. While he had been daydreaming about having the wench up against a tree, the trees had well and truly closed in around them, covering the darkening sky in their thickly leafed branches, stripping the world of light and, it seemed to Jaime, of air. The last birds had gone silent or had never sung in this part of the forest at all, and the only light left in the world came from the bonfire which burned in the small clearing before them. 

The bonfire licked and danced in Lannister colors, red and yellow and not at all reassuring to Jaime, and was reflected in the structure erected behind it. It looked like a hut or a cave, but a cave made of something long and thin and white, row upon row of it, with curlicues and cornices, for all the world like a model castle for little lords and ladies to play with until they learned about trebuchets and curtain walls and how cornices could be used to break enemy skulls as well as fly banners. 

“Brienne,” Jaime spoke calmly, despite an unease which gathered in his breast faster than the night thickened all around them, “why would the Hound build himself a cave of bones?”

“Not… bones,” spoke a voice which was not Brienne’s. A voice as dry and raspy as sand and dry leaves, as stones grinding against each other. “Not… only bones… Kingslayer.”


	3. The Witch

Brienne could only imagine what Jaime was seeing. 

She could only imagine it because she knew the sight before her already, knew it as well as what would happen next, what would be said and what she would do. She knew no past ( _the slide of Jaime’s hip against her thigh, tearing a wordless cry from her lips even as the truth still choked her_ ) and no future, only what was. Her death coming towards her in a hobbling, hunched form wrapped in a black cape, a white hand clutching at its throat. She felt peace settle over her with the night, and welcomed it. Let her die and let this be done. Let Jaime live and remember that she was true to him in the end, had been true to him the previous night, though she had also lied and deceived him most gravely. 

The thing that had once been Catelyn Stark came to a stop before their horses, silhouetted against the roaring flames which concealed and revealed the contours of her cave, made her a smudge of deepest darkness in the night. The horses caught the scent of decay and whickered, backing away in fear. Brienne tried to wrestle hers into submission when the dead woman took her hand away from her throat, made a sharp gesture. 

“Down.” 

The air whistled through the gaping hole in her throat, the command more screech than human word. Brienne obeyed, her arms and legs moving as though jerked by invisible strings, and was surprised to see Jaime do the same. Their horses bolted as soon as they cleared the saddles, crashing blindly through the trees, undoubtedly to step into a rabbit hole and break their necks. 

Brienne could spare no thought for the animals while she watched the creature which called itself Lady Stoneheart come up to Jaime, close enough for him to recognize what was left of Lady Stark in its ravaged, bloated, chalk-white features, for his eyes to grow wide with the recognition. He held his arms stiffly by his sides, his legs were as straight as though he were standing at attention. Brienne tried to shift her own stiff arms and legs, found that she could just about do so. Their captor must have extended the binding to hold them both, and so could not control them both completely. Brienne tested the binding further, opened her mouth and said the first thing that came to her, the thing she had said before she had let him bed her. “Forgive me, Jaime.” 

Lady Stoneheart covered her throat, wheezing in a ghastly parody of a laugh. “He is… past… forgiveness… as are you… oathbreaker.” 

“Lady Stark,” Jaime drawled, sounding admirably close to his usual self despite being bound and held by an undead sorceress who was about to add his bones to her home. Brienne felt a flutter of hope to hear him not only speak his own words, but speak them with such foolhardy insouciance. “You are looking marvelously healthy, given the circumstances. And I seem to be your captive again. A sad oversight, I am certain.” His elbows strained against invisible bonds, snapped against his ribs with an audible crunch that made him wince. In the same moment, Brienne felt her own binding loosen a little as Lady Stoneheart concentrated her power and fury on keeping Jaime under control. 

“Tell him… Brienne.” The dead woman’s voice whipped Brienne so she gasped, wondered if the binder knew what she was thinking. “Tell him… how this… came to pass. You may… as well… speak… while you can.”

So Brienne did. In a level tone like she was reciting her septa’s lessons, she told Jaime how Lady Stark had been brought back to not-quite-life by Thoros of Myr and Beric Dondarrion three days after her murder, had been abandoned by the Brotherhood Without Banners once her altered nature was revealed and the Brothers saw how little of Lady Stark remained in that heart of stone. How she had taken a new name and built her cave of spun-sugar sticks to lure children from villages far and wide, to cut out their living hearts and use them to keep her dead flesh from decaying further, to feed her rage for revenge, the children’s bones added to her cave, bones which glistened as white as the sugar in the firelight. How Brienne had been captured by Lady Stoneheart in this very clearing, had been forced to listen to her story, bound by her and sent to Pennytree to lure Jaime Lannister, the scourge of the Starks, to his death. 

Brienne told it all as briefly as she could, leaving out her own horror at first hearing the tale from the wheezing horror before them, forgoing the desire to beg Jaime’s forgiveness again. She suspected that the binding would not have held so true had Brienne not clung still to her oath to Lady Stark. Bound or not, Brienne knew she should not have brought Jaime here. Instead of using the fact that the binding compelled her words, not her deeds, to touch Jaime under false pretenses, she should have cut her own throat before ever she set foot in his tent. But she had wanted to see him, one last time. A woman in the end, weak and wanton, never again to act the warrior she had once believed herself to be. Too late now, for everything. 

Brienne stood still, unable to meet Jaime’s eyes or bear his leaden silence, so unlike him. She waited for their captor to produce swords or spears and have them fight each other, praying against hope to the Warrior that she would be able to let Jaime kill her easily, before the binding tightened around her and made her prolong the duel, to sate Lady Stoneheart’s desire to see them both suffer. She would gladly die with Jaime’s curses in her ears, to know that he was free and would live, whether to hate her or mourn her. That he would _live_. 

“Brienne…” Lady Stoneheart said. “Give me… your sword… and fetch… the knife.” 

Brienne’s limbs moved before she could think about the words. The knife. The bone-handled knife which her captor had shown her during the binding, the knife she used to cut out lost children’s beating hearts. The knife. Not swords or spears or even sharp rocks. The knife. 

Brienne found it on the floor of the cave, the air inside thick with the sweet, cloying smells of decay and sugar, a vicious, long-bladed thing made to inflict suffering, not to deliver peace. When she emerged from the cave with it, she found Jaime on his knees, his shoulders hunched as though he were in a cage too small for him, his sword gone. He was much closer to the roaring bonfire than before, so close she could see the fires dancing in his eyes. Remembered how the fire from the brazier had caressed him in his tent, made Brienne want to touch him like that, a touch both welcome and warm. Felt her heart clench painfully in her chest, felt, incredibly, the binding on her loosen just a little more, a hair’s breadth. 

Jaime was staring at her and through her, but she bore his gaze, marveling silently at her ability to move the fingers that held the knife a fraction more than she could before she had remembered him as he had been only the previous night, a lifetime and an age ago. His voice dripped venom when he addressed her. “You thought she would have us duel, didn’t you? Were you hoping to let me kill you, wench? Buy my life and buy yourself an _honorable_ death?” He paused, his mouth twisting in a way she had not seen since their first days together when he had spat insults at her like pebbles, since his incoherent rages after he had lost his hand and she had urged him to live. Always urged him to live, and do better than before. “You stupid cunt,” he spat, but though she felt their sting, his words did not hurt her. He spoke true. She had done something terrible, and would have to do better. 

Lady Stoneheart stood over Jaime like a priestess of the Red God who had given her what little life she had, reached for the knife, held her other hand to her throat. “Hold out… your hand… Lannister,” she said. “I will… take that… first… the hand… that pushed… my child… before I cut out… your heart… and feed the rest… to the flames.”

“How poetic, seeing as your son lived and some children have died here of late,” Jaime drawled defiantly. “I thought burning dead bodies was what they did beyond the Wall, to prevent horrors like you from rising. Or are you hoping my heartless ghost will be forced to wander the Seven Kingdoms forever, crying for that lost piece of flesh?” He smirked up at his captor, turning his head to do so, and Brienne’s heart squeezed again to see him able to move that much. She wondered if he was even aware he was doing it. 

“Jaime,” she began before her voice was drowned out by Lady Stoneheart’s rasp. 

“Your heart… will give me… the justice… I crave,” the dead thing said. “You have… never used… your heart… for much… anyway.” 

Jaime laughed at that, a ragged, breathless sound that went on for much longer than Brienne would have thought possible from a man on the verge of death. But then, she knew just how much Jaime had loved, and could love. Even so, she may not have spoken again had he not looked straight at her as that terrible laughter died on his lips, and spoken in a voice better suited to discussing the weather, the disappearance of dragons, or any other self-evident matter. “The dead do not know much, do they? I have never had to use my heart for quite _so much_ before.”

Brienne took a deep breath, the breath that held her life and his in its insubstantial confines, and spoke. 

“Jaime,” she said. “Tell my lady about last night.” 

He stared at her for only a moment before his lips curved in a smile almost as wicked as some he had flung at her in the more distant past, then slid over her like a silk kerchief only a night ago, and he told Lady Stoneheart about their night. About Brienne’s skin, how she had flushed and heated at his touch. About her breasts, her hands, her mouth, her cunt. About her gasps, her shudders, her moans. The truth her body had told him and heard from his body in turn. 

Lady Stoneheart screeched at him to hold his filthy tongue and hold out his hand, but Jaime talked on, his words gliding over hers, slithering under them, soaring over the dead thing’s rage. His breath started to come labored, ragged, pained, but still he talked on. And the more he talked, the more Lady Stoneheart tried to bind him into silence, the more Brienne could feel the binding on her loosen, slip, flow away like water, leaving her limbs as smoothly as the lies she was bound to tell had once fallen from her mouth. She let the bone-handled knife drop from her hand. 

Brienne had a moment to wonder if Lady Stoneheart had tried and failed to bind the Brotherhood Without Banners after they had brought her back. If maybe, had she succeeded, she would have gone down a different path, a bandit queen who could not be killed, a flare of hope to smallfolk for whom dead kings mattered little but undead protectors could mean much. May not have become a terror cowering in the woods, stealing children and luring those who had done her some wrong, thought hardly the most, to their doom. 

Then Brienne took one long step, and another, pulled back her arms, the binding trailing from her fingertips like spider-silk, and pushed the dead woman, the last thing that remained of the good and kind Lady Stark, into the bonfire. Jaime’s face was purple with lack of breath but he managed to duck his head, so the creature’s legs caught and tripped over his bent back. Lady Stoneheart tumbled head first into the raging heart of the fire, there to thrash, screeching and grasping, for a much shorter time than any truly living thing would have done. Very soon, there was nothing left of her but some charred bones barely visible in the dancing, twining, spitting, red and yellow flames. 

Brienne fell to her knees beside Jaime, laid a trembling hand on his hunched shoulder. 

“‘M alive, wench,” he said in an old man’s strangled voice, but the crooked grin she glimpsed was nearly one she recognized. “‘Ve seen me out of breath before.” 

She threw all caution and trepidation into the flames, and hugged Jaime with both arms, weeping silently. His arms slid over hers after a moment. They knelt there, her breaths steadying and his deepening, by a roaring but slowly dying bonfire, in a clearing with a cave made of sweet lures and death. Clung to each other like children cowering under the covers after one Winter’s-night story too many.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In addition to standing in for the witch’s demand for Hansel to put his finger through the bars of the cage so she can see if he has gotten fat enough to eat, Lady S threatening to cut off Jaime’s remaining hand is a nod to show!canon, in which it is indeed his left hand that pushes Bran. How did Lady S know that, you ask? The dead have their ways… ;-) We are almost out of the woods, gentle reader.


	4. Aftermath

Despite the moonless darkness, neither wished to linger in the clearing till morning. Lady Stoneheart’s presence had emptied that part of the forest of wild beasts and brigands, and the Teeth of the First Men shone white as ice even in the deep gloom, spelling a path for the two to follow back. They walked all night and most of the next day, and were still at least half a day’s march from Jaime’s camp when night caught them again. Not daring a fire, they huddled together under their cloaks by the path, behind one of the white stones. They had barely spoken since leaving the clearing with its grisly cave and heap of embers, left it all to be melted by rain and crunched by hail, back into the earth. 

Brienne tried to lie very still on the hard ground, acutely aware of every point where her body touched Jaime’s. His golden hand rested against her hip and was cold, even through her clothes, with the night’s gathering chill. Or perhaps the chills came from Brienne as she relived the previous night again and again, bound to the memory against her will. 

Jaime shifted against her, sighed. “We will have to speak of it, wench,” he said conversationally. 

Brienne did not wince or move. She kept absolutely still, hardly daring to breathe. 

After a pause, Jaime went on. “By rights, I ought to hate you. Call you oathbreaker. Cast you out and threaten you with a lion’s wrath if ever I see your ugly face again.” 

There was enough starlight coming through the trees that Brienne could make out, out of the corner of her eye, his face turned toward her. She would not look at him, hoped she would not cry. 

“Yes,” Jaime mused. “That is what you deserve, if there is any justice in the world. Do you think there is?”

At that, Brienne had to turn her head to face him, though she still did not speak. 

“Hmm, Brienne?” Jaime prompted gently. “Do you think there is any justice, with the likes of me saving the realm from tearing itself apart completely, and Lady Stoneheart coming back from the grave? Do you think me a fit judge of any kind of justice? Or that I could bear to send you away again, seeing as recent experience suggests you cannot be trusted to keep yourself safe from the fell clutches of evil, undead sorceresses? And then come back to tell me a pack of lies a child would not believe, and make advances wholly inappropriate in a maid?” 

“Jaime,” Brienne breathed, to prevent him from speaking further, to urge him to speak on, to tell him all her truths. 

He fumbled past his golden hand, found her hand lying cold and motionless on the ground, squeezed it almost painfully. 

“I _will_ be angry about this,” he said. “I will have some choice things to say to you, eventually. But not tonight. Or tomorrow or,” his voice grew thick as honey, slid down Brienne’s breastbone and back like a touch, like a tongue, “I dare say, tomorrow night. We _will_ have words about this, wench. But first we will have a bath and a meal, and we will fuck until I am compelled to think at least a little fondly of Catelyn Stark, since she brought you to my bed at last. Then we will see.”

Brienne gnawed hard on her lower lip to prevent herself from speaking, failed. “Sansa Stark…” she began. 

Jaime squeezed her hand very hard, and she broke off, gasping with the pain, his promise still winding its way between her heart and her stomach. 

“We will _see_ , I said. I am still a member of the Kingsguard, at least on parchment. There are other Lannisters still living, and I owe them some loyalty, poor though it may be.” He soothed the pain from her hand with his thumb, spoke into her ear, his breath even warmer than her heating skin. “Sansa Stark may or may not live still,” he whispered, “and we will find out which before we do anything. Either way, you do _not_ hare off on your own anymore. I give you my word I will aid you in every way I can. Can you abide by that, wench?”

There was no mistaking the oath or the insinuation in his words. Or that his hand in hers, his breath on her face, his promise of heated pleasure and angry recrimination spoke clearly to Brienne, no pretense, no hidden feints in the words. 

“Yes,” she whispered in turn. “Yes, Jaime, I can.” Like jewels and pearls from a thief’s pockets, the words fell heavy and true from her mouth.


End file.
